Setting up Google Apps for Work

Just recently I decided to switch the email for my domain over to Google Apps for Business, so that I could use Hangouts and Drive exclusively for my consulting clients, rather than trying to do things through my personal @gmail account; the benefits are that everything on this domain is client based, and I get more storage than I do on the free account.

After setting up the account, I had to set up the MX entries on my current host. Since I use CPanel, I followed the instructions provided by Google, but thought that some pictures might help.

Step 1: Select MX Entries in the Email portion of the CPanel:

Step 2: Once you’ve selected the domain where you hope to apply the settings (if you have more than one), choose Remote Mail Exchanger

That’s it. All you need to do now is wait. Google’s documentation tells you that you may need to wait 72 hours for it to fully propagate, but for my transition, the transition was done in less than 24 hours.

Setting up Email on my Phone

It’s normally pretty straightforward to set up an email on my Android phone, but for some reason, when i tried to add the new account, I kept getting a mysterious “An error has occurred. Please try again later.” This, of course, is no help at all in determining why the account couldn’t be added.

The issue, it turns out, was that I use two-factor authentication on all my Google accounts, and Google was experiencing an odd issue with the mail set up on the Android app when leaving the setup app to look at the 6 digit code in my Authenticator app. After talking to the second tier of tech-support, I was told that this was the issue, and that if I could use the text-message based authentication method, I could read the digits from the notification bar without leaving the setup app. Also, I was told it would be resolved within two weeks. But if you use two-factor, and run into this much later, try switching to SMS for the code.

Before I got to the second tier, however, I was asked to try several things in my Administrator interface.

Setting up email for users

The first level of tech support told me that the security settings for users need to be modified to allow the users to control the security. If these settings are set to the default “Disable access…” then all users in your account will be blocked from using these less secure apps (like Gmail).

Step 1: Go into Security settings in the admin panel

Step 2: Pull up Basic Settings and look for the “Less Secure Apps”

Step 3: Set the settings to allow users to control the settings for less secure apps like email